Thanks Frogboy, I have not applied it yet. Just wanted to say that the guys at Mojang have been doing the same thing with Minecraft since it hit 1.0 and it has made the wait for updates much easier to handle. I for one think this a good idea. Need some sleep before I try to play some more FE. Enjoying it so far, it seems like there is always something to do before you start pounding the turn button for the next research bonus to hit.

Tried this for my third game - first two ran about 5-6 hours apiece before I got frustrated with some bad choices I had made and started over. During the first two games, I only had one CTD altogether, and no turn processing problems. With this, I got to turn 7 or so and the turn hung up.

Frogboy, what is the technical reason for loading from within the game and new games from within the game causing major instabilities? Is it to do with not de-allocating memory from all those threads?

There's a whole host of issues that have become problematic, particularly with DirectX 9 games. Much of it comes down to getting the drivers to really REALLY release their memory, particularly on say Windows XP running a DirectX 9 era video card. The driver teams at their respective companies are very responsive but obviously, an indie strategy game isn't going to get their bug fixing attention as fast as say EA.

It also doesn't help that there's just a lot of sloppy code in there. We have great developers but it's a very young team. The veterans were on Impulse during WOM. We've been able to bring on veterans in the past year which has helped but there is still sloppy handling of memory management.